Mike Gilliland of Hallsboro checks the growth progress of his running speckled butterbeans.

By RAY WYCHE
Staff Writer

By all rights, Mike Gilliland deserves a seat in a slow-moving rocking chair.

Bothered with poor eyesight and bones and joints that are beginning to show 91 years of living (about 80 of which were spent in hard work in log woods) Gilliland could say with a clear conscience that it’s time for someone else to make the garden.

But the retired logging contractor wants no part of such a life.

These hot summer days, he can be found on the scattered plots of cleared land behind his home off Highway 214 in Hallsboro, plowing and disking and making rows with his Farmall Super A tractor or cleaning out weeds and grass with his tiller or loosening the soil around his younger plants with a special cultivator type rake he had made to his order.

Gilliland produces an unbelievable amount of vegetables on his half-acre-plus patches of land. His family is limited to only an unmarried son, who lives with him, and a daughter who lives in Wilmington, so what does he do with the multitude of vegetables he coaxes out of his land? Put them up for sale?
Quick to answer.

“I’ve never sold anything out of my garden in my life and I’m not going to start now.”

But he’ll give it away, and on occasions even pick it for the recipient.

Even during the summers when he led logging crews into the breezeless depths of forests, working himself from sunup to sundown, he used the few remaining hours of daylight to work his vegetables.
“I had the same garden when I was logging that I have now; I just didn’t take care of it as good as I do now.”

A look at the wide-spaced rows will show that someone is taking care of the vegetables; no grass is visible. The plants, started at intervals to ensure that something fresh will be available for most of the time, are bright green, the result of judicious watering in dry spells.

He plants the usual vegetables of this area; his butterbean crop is extensive, with pole (running) as well as bush plants now producing heavily, and with more plants reaching the harvesting stage in a few days. There are different varieties of tomatoes scattered about.

When one crop finishes bearing, he heads to that area with his Super A and within hours, usually, new seeds are in the ground.

Gilliland had a four-inch well drilled in his garden solely to provide water for his plants when nature doesn’t.

In mid-summer, when even devoted gardeners tend to let the grass take over vegetables nearing the ends of their productive periods, Gilliland fights his battles with unwanted weeds.

“I like to work it in the middle of the day, in the sun,” he says.

Living and working in less than comfortable situations is nothing new to the tall, rail-thin Gilliland. During World War II, he earned five battle stars as a U. S. Army infantryman, fighting his way across France and Germany and living in horrible conditions in cold, muddy foxholes.

Today, most of his weeding is done with his special rake tool and a hoe.

“I can’t see to plow with my tractor,” he says of his cultivating. “I was plowing up my stuff too bad. Now I use the tiller and hoe and rake.”

To accommodate his deteriorating eyesight, Gilliland sets up small red flags along his rows to help him guide his Super A. His rows run straight and true.

Visitors to his garden (and it’s hard to get away without a bag of some type of fresh vegetables), ask him why a 91-year-old widower would tend such a large garden, Gilliland shrugs his shoulders and says, “I just like to make a garden.”